CUNY Academic Commons

As I understand it from a conversation with Chris Caruso, this request is part of a larger possible plan to have some GC doctoral programs start using the Commons as a replacement for departmental listservs. It's an exciting idea that I've asked Chris to present on at our next team meeting.

FWIW we already have BP Reply By Email, so listservs could be powered by group forums. I'm not eager to set up a separate but parallel system for blog posts. If blog support is required, we should talk to Ray about what it would entail to add support to his plugin.

About BP Reply By Email, someone requested supporting WP without BuddyPress.

I've outlined the steps needed here:
http://dev.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2012/07/27/introducing-buddypress-reply-by-email-beta/#comment-1388

Basically RBE doesn't do a lot of heavy lifting, it requires a 3rd-party plugin to do the email sending; there are a ton of WP email subscription plugins as outlined above.

What RBE does is listen to all outgoing emails and manipulates the Reply-To header and the body contents of the email if necessary.

The tricky situation I see is enabling RBE on sub-sites because RBE would need to post to individual blogs and that would entail the use of switch_to_blog(), which is optimized in WP 3.5, but not for versions below that.

For multisite, we would also need to add some admin options for regular blog admins so they could turn RBE on.

There's also adding in the capability to post to specific categories, etc, so there is a bit of work involved.

If we don't want RBE to support blogs, there is another plugin that allows posting blog posts by email:
https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/postie/

I'm not eager to set up a separate but parallel system for blog posts.

Let's talk about this with Chris when we meet. I think there are real benefits to doing it through a blog -- if postings are tagged appropriately (events, cfps, jobs, etc.), one could wind up with a web-accessible archive of postings that begins to resemble something like this: http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/

At any rate, let's hear Chris out at our meeting so we can hear his thoughts on this.

If Postie can accomplish what Chris wants, let's go with it. It sounds like it's going to take a lot of work to do what he needs using RBE. It's worth the annoyance of having two separate systems if we can avoid many dozens of development hours.

Dom, in preparation for our next meeting, can you do a bit of investigation into Postie? Does it do what the OP requests, in terms of blog categories etc? Does it seems well-maintained and well-liked?

I will look into, however, as I discussed with Matt, I might not be at the dev meeting due to my friday calc class. That also might be our midterm, the professor has not finalized the date yet. If I can get outa class I'll be at the meeting.

No problem, Dom. Just have a look sometime in the next week and leave a few comments on this ticket. No need to go into a huge amount of depth.